The International Workshop on "Radiation Damage to DNA: Techniques, Quantitation, and Mechanisms" will cover material aimed at determining the pathways initiated by energy deposition and ending with biological effects. This is the fifth in a series of international workshops that brings together physicists, chemists, and biologists, facilitating the interchange of recent advances in radiation damage to DNA within a multidisciplinary format. The topics that will be covered included track structure and the physics of energy deposition, biophysical modeling of DNA damage, low energy studies of DNA damage, effect of radiation quality on damage type, low dose studies using microbeam technology to single track and spatial effects of DNA damage, base and sugar damage, simulation of chemical/biochemical processes in irradiated cells, role of bound water in DNA damage induction, influence of DNA packaging on damage, including fragmentation, and on its repair, molecular/chemical assays for DNA damage, clustered lesions in DNA: induction, cellular processing and significance, relationship between DNA damage and chromosome aberrations. The workshop will be the 20th-23rd of April, 1997, at the Windermere Hotel in Bowness-on-Windermere, England. The number of participants is limited to 100. An important role of this meeting is to decrease polarization by discipline and stimulate new approaches by scientists who become aware of the relevance of the findings from other projects to their own work. Although the focus of individual approaches spans physics, chemistry, and biology, the common goal of all participants is to understand the biological endpoints in terms of predictable alterations in DNA. To this end, an effort will be made to work on a common language, between the physicists and chemists, with the objective of facilitating communication with investigators working on biological endpoints.